Creating Order....

[AEIOU]

@Eponette's recent post about how to divide up a larger map reminded me of my wonderment at reading Foucault's "The Order of Things" almost 30 years ago. My memory is terrible which makes it all the more interesting to me that this one passage has stuck with me almost my whole life. I don't remember the rest of that book....

I'll quote the first paragraph in full because it really drove it home to me and made me contemplate what other possibilities might be for creating order out of my life (and games). Such a simple thing but it made my formative mind hurt.

"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that
shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought
- our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our
geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with
which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things,
and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our
age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes
a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are
divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in
the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a
very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water
pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment
of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing
that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another
system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of
thinking that"

We are accustomed to putting things in containers. We have a need to create order. But time and time again, we find this simple task to be infinitely more complex than it appears on the surface. Rivers cross map borders, political boundries fluctuate, ocean's touch every landmass...people travel and relocate.

RealmWorks allows us to put things in containers. We can classify things the way we've always thought of them. But Rob thinks much like the wise Borges. He forsaw that everything isn't quite so neat and tidy. We cannot create one size that fits all. We cannot have a single consistent taxonomy. Nothing is simple.

RealmWorks implemented tags (and relationships) so that information can be identified and classified and tied to multiple things. A successful baker can live in the mountains, in a a city, in a house on Grove Street AND live in a summer home by the sea AND belong to the Merchant's Guild and the Thieve's Guild AND be a mother of six with a wonderful husband and a cruel step sister.... And as we learn more of this woman, the tags (and relationships) that define her, that locate her, that identify her will keep expanding. She is complex. And we cannot put her into a single container.

I encourage RealmWorks users to embrace the teachings of ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’. Use containers as a tool. But recognize that they are limited and that there may be other approaches that work better even if they are foreign to how we've been taught.

[Chemlak]

I follow a simple rule (now, after many mistakes that made life hard):

Containers are for physical containment that can only be changed through the activity of an external agency. Any other connection between two topics is a relationship.

My computer is within my house. (Container)
I own my computer. (Relationship)
I own my house. (Relationship)
My house is in England. (Container, though I'd probably use the village I live in rather than the country)
I love my wife (Relationship)
My heart is in my chest (Container, I hope)

[MNBlockHead]

Good points. Though, why need containers as separate from relationships? Any container is also a relationship. That said, back in the early 2000s I tried to get away from folders in my e-mail and only use tags. When Gmail came along it made it even easier to take this approach with "labels". A lot of document management software started to offer things like "smart folders" which just combined the concept of a folder, a tag, and a saved search into one concept. Google Apps with Google Docs--same thing. Then Evernote. But after years of trying to live with just "tags" and search, I find that I still use directory folders. Tags can get messy quickly. They are great when you have large numbers of people tagging the same documents to build folksonomies that allow for algorithms to predict relationships and interests but because a traditional folder means a copy of the document has to be there, it causes you to really think about how you organize your information.

With Gmail, for example, I now rarely use labels. I it just ended up being more busy work. I rely on search and auto-classification. For Evernote, I still use tags but I still rely on folders for the "big buckets."

I'm still trying to determine the best approach in Realmworks. For me, a lot of it comes down to how important it is for me to find an article within the directory structure. So, for example, I have equipment organized by containers. e.g. armor/heavy armor/plate mail

With my bestiary, however, I keep it flat as I find it easier to scroll through an alphabetical list than drill down throw containers and having to remember how a particular monster may have been categorized. For monsters, tags make more sense for those times when I want to find all monsters of a certain type—but most of the time, I know the monster I want by name and can easily get to it in an alphabetical list.

So, my organization is not as logically consistent as Chemlak's and based more on how I generally try to get to a given type of article. I hope it doesn't come to bite me in the future, but for now it works well.